Communique from the Squat!Net tech team

(French, Spanish, German, and Dutch versions below)

April 16th, 2018

Dear comrades,

As you probably already noticed, the Squat!Net server has not been
functioning very well for a while now. There are a number of reasons for
this: the hardware is old and nearing the end of its life, the collective
doesn’t have much energy to maintain the service and the software we use
to run the server is pretty outdated. Last week, one of the mailaccounts
was abused to send tons of spam into the world. This resulted in the
mailserver crippling under the amount of mail being sent, our server
address ending up on blacklists of known spammers, and lots of your
valid e-mails being delayed, sometimes for days, or not delivered at all.
These problems have by now been resolved and mail is flowing as usual
again.

Fixing this spam issue, however, did not solve the more structural
problems we face as a collective, nor the technical state of the server
resembling that of a rotten old punk with barely any teeth left. To
address this, we are in the process of resuming the nomadic squat life
and abandoning our old house. A large part of the websites have already
been moved away from the old server and found a new roof under machines
of allied collectives. We are planning to do the same for the rest of
the websites, as well as the mail and mailinglists. In time, you will
receive more details about the move, but for now we are still busy with
preparations.

For now, we do have an important question for you: would you like to
keep your @squat.net e-mail address?
We have a lot of abandoned mailboxes on the server, and it would be nice
to know which we should move and which can be deleted.

We will make sure to keep all mailboxes that have been used at least
once in the last year, but we will not keep older ones. If you know
somebody or a collective who has an account, and you think they don’t
check it regularly, please tell them about it.

Apart from this, we appreciate any input on which services you value or
would like to see on squat!net. For instance, we ourselves feel like
Radar[1], the online calendar, is doing very well, we are happy with the
newssites[2] still being kept up to date in several languages, but we
feel the websites for specific squats and our e-mail service are in a
miserable state. Do you think it’s important to have e-mail and
webhosting for squats on squat!net? Should we rather focus on radar and
news? Do you miss specific services that would benefit the squat
movement? Let us know!